Book 1, Chapter 2

Book 1, Chapter 2

II

0

I DO NOT REMEMBER our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime
before daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy
work-horses. When I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying
in a little room, scarcely larger than the bed that held me,
and the window-shade at my head was flapping softly in a warm wind.
A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and black hair,
stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my grandmother.
She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes
she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot
of my bed.

1

`Had a good sleep, Jimmy?' she asked briskly. Then in a very different
tone she said, as if to herself, `My, how you do look like your father!'
I remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have come
to wake him like this when he overslept. `Here are your clean clothes,'
she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she talked.
`But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice warm
bath behind the stove. Bring your things; there's nobody about.'

2

`Down to the kitchen' struck me as curious; it was always `out
in the kitchen' at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings
and followed her through the living-room and down a flight
of stairs into a basement. This basement was divided into a
dining-room at the right of the stairs and a kitchen at the left.
Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed--the plaster laid
directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts.
The floor was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling
there were little half-windows with white curtains, and pots
of geraniums and wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered
the kitchen, I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking.
The stove was very large, with bright nickel trimmings,
and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall,
and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water.
When she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used
to taking my bath without help. `Can you do your ears, Jimmy?
Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a right smart little boy.'

3

It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my
bath-water through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came
up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously.
While I scrubbed, my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until
I called anxiously, `Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning!'
Then she came laughing, waving her apron before her as if she
were shooing chickens.

4

She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt
to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention,
as if she were looking at something, or listening to something,
far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only
because she was so often thinking of things that were far away.
She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements.
Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke
with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous
that everything should go with due order and decorum.
Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident,
but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then
fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.

5

After I was dressed, I explored the long cellar next the kitchen.
It was dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented,
with a stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went.
Under one of the windows there was a place for them to wash when they
came in from work.

6

While my grandmother was busy about supper, I settled myself on
the wooden bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat--
he caught not only rats and mice, but gophers, I was told.
The patch of yellow sunlight on the floor travelled back toward
the stairway, and grandmother and I talked about my journey,
and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she said
they were to be our nearest neighbours. We did not talk about
the farm in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years.
But after the men came in from the fields, and we were all
seated at the supper table, then she asked Jake about the old
place and about our friends and neighbours there.

7

My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed
me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative.
I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity,
and was a little in awe of him. The thing one immediately
noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard.
I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an
Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.

8

Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man;
they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle.
His teeth were white and regular--so sound that he had never
been to a dentist in his life. He had a delicate skin,
easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man
his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.

9

As we sat at the table, Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances
at each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper
that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led
an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits.
His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia,
and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a while.
He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us,
but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.

10

The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me
about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale;
he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks,
but he was a `perfect gentleman,' and his name was Dude. Fuchs told
me everything I wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming
blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso.
He promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day.
He got out his `chaps' and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me,
and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in bold design--
roses, and true-lover's knots, and undraped female figures.
These, he solemnly explained, were angels.

11

Before we went to bed, Jake and Otto were called up to the
living-room for prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed
spectacles and read several Psalms. His voice was so
sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I wished he had
chosen one of my favourite chapters in the Book of Kings.
I was awed by his intonation of the word `Selah.' `He shall
choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom
He loved. Selah.' I had no idea what the word meant;
perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it became oracular,
the most sacred of words.

12

Early the next morning I ran out-of-doors to look about me.
I had been told that ours was the only wooden house west
of Black Hawk--until you came to the Norwegian settlement,
where there were several. Our neighbours lived in sod
houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy.
Our white frame house, with a storey and half-storey above
the basement, stood at the east end of what I might call
the farmyard, with the windmill close by the kitchen door.
From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the barns
and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard
and bare, and washed out in winding gullies by the rain.
Beyond the corncribs, at the bottom of the shallow draw,
was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow bushes growing about it.
The road from the post-office came directly by our door,
crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond,
beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken
prairie to the west. There, along the western sky-line it skirted
a great cornfield, much larger than any field I had ever seen.
This cornfield, and the sorghum patch behind the barn,
were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as far as the eye
could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass,
most of it as tall as I.

13

North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip
of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow.
This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard
to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against the grass.
It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the plum-patch
behind the sod chicken-house.

14

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water
is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour
of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up.
And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow,
to be running.

15

I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out,
her sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I
did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.

16

The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house,
and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral.
Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane,
tipped with copper, which hung by a leather thong from
her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane.
I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife;
she had killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth.
A little girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten
on the ankle and had been sick all summer.

17

I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my
grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning.
Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more
than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh,
easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy
grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo
were galloping, galloping ...

18

Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps,
for the big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their
withering vines--and I felt very little interest in it when I
got there. I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass
and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.
The light air about me told me that the world ended here:
only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one
went a little farther there would be only sun and sky,
and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks
which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.
While grandmother took the pitchfork we found standing
in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them
up out of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag,
I kept looking up at the hawks that were doing what I might
so easily do.

19

When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there
in the garden awhile.

20

She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet.
`Aren't you afraid of snakes?'

21

`A little,' I admitted, `but I'd like to stay, anyhow.'

22

`Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him.
The big yellow and brown ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes
and help to keep the gophers down. Don't be scared if you
see anything look out of that hole in the bank over there.
That's a badger hole. He's about as big as a big 'possum,
and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a
chicken once in a while, but I won't let the men harm him.
In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals.
I like to have him come out and watch me when I'm at work.'

23

Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder
and went down the path, leaning forward a little.
The road followed the windings of the draw; when she came
to the first bend, she waved at me and disappeared.
I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.

24

I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely
approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin.
There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows,
full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected
the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big
as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines.
The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered
draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing
its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave.
The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.
Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me.
Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still
as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen.
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins,
and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy.
Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire,
whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate,
that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

This version of the text was edited by Laura Krahn and Kristen Seas, 2000.

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